The Long Sword (34 page)

No one did, however.

We did create a bread riot. The podestà turned out his army of thugs and drove the poor back under the piers and into the chicken coops and barns and sewers where they lived. I met him in person; I had mounted my friends and our squires and we made a living wall of armour and horseflesh that covered the legate and his people as they served Mass to the last stragglers of the poor.

‘Who the devil are you?’ he swore.

I pointed to the man in a brown habit, apparently impervious to the vicious wind. ‘This is the papal legate for the Crusade. He has come to negotiate with your lords.’

The podestà’s horse was nervous. It was the smell of blood that was worrying the animal: the podestà’s men-at-arms had killed a dozen of the beggars. Just behind the podestà, a small woman was pounded to the ground by a man in armour with a steel mace, the sort I grew accustomed to seeing in the hands of Turks, later.

She was fifty, or even older, with no teeth and wisps of white hair and he caved in her skull with a whoop.

‘This thing is fucking perfect!’ he shouted, and tossed his bloody mace in the air.

Some of the other men-at-arms had the good grace to look away.

Some laughed.

At my back, Marc-Antonio had the legate mounted.

‘I’d thank you for an escort through the streets,’ I said to the podestà. In powerful Italian cities, the officer who commands the garrison is usually a foreigner. That way, he can’t get mixed up in the endless internal quarrels of house against house that divide the Italians as much as money unites them. Looking at this man’s hat, his gleaming harness and his sword, I guessed he was Milanese.

He frowned. ‘Papal legate? Never heard of him, but if he makes another riot …’

One of Sabraham’s men appeared by my left boot, on foot. He tugged at my stirrup to get my attention. When I looked at him, he gave me the Order’s sign for a direction and I nodded.

‘Your men cannot be armed in the city,’ the podestà said.

I bowed. I made no answer, but hoped that my bow would cover the exigencies of the situation.

Even as I spoke to the podestà, two more beggars tried to run to safety behind us, risking our warhorse’s legs to get away from the podestà’s men. Both were men – one a leper, with no lips and no nose, and the other a poor deformed mite, a very small man or even a boy with something awry with his face.

The leper got away – no one likes to catch a leper – but the mite was trapped by the man with the bloody mace. He caught the little man in the corner where two warehouses came together in a jumble of garbage and old roofing, and he grinned.

‘Watch this, messieurs!’ he shouted with glee, and the mace rose—

Fiore stripped it out of his hand. His horse pranced out of our line, he flowed through the other mounted man and dumped him in the gutter and backed his horse to our line before the podestà’s men, still milling about like a stag hunt at the kill, could react.

The podestà’s face grew red-purple. He pointed at Fiore. ‘Arrest that—’

I put a hand on his reins. ‘It is bad manners to attack people during Mass, my lord. You have just attacked these poor people while the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Ambassador of the King of Jerusalem, was saying
Mass.
’ While in my head I applauded Fiore’s action, I would have traded the life of a beggar for a little peace.

The podestà opened his mouth. Some men despise anything that brooks their authority and this was one such. He didn’t hate me as a Milanese or as the podestà – he just hated me for not cringing.

‘We are knight-volunteers of the Order of St John, if you are too
fucking
ignorant of the habit of the Order to know.’ I’d had it with trying to be polite. ‘Unless you want to see your whole city under interdict, kindly clear the way.’

The podestà glared at me, but short of ordering his men to attack mine, there wasn’t much he could do.

The man-at-arms in the mud got to his feet cursing. He stomped to his horse and called to Fiore, ‘I’ll know you again, fuckhead!’

Nerio laughed. ‘And we will know you by the smell.’ His contempt was beautiful. It hurt the podestà’s thugs more than our blows might have.

And I was sure that we could take them. Just at that moment, I would cheerfully have made the streets of Genoa run with their blood.

Sometimes I think I am the wrong man to command an escort for a living saint.

On the other hand, we got to our inn alive.

I had nothing to do with the negotiations, which is probably for the best. I had developed an instant contempt for Genoa and I’ve never changed my mind.

Everywhere in Genoa, there are slaves. In Venice there are a few, mostly Moslems. In Genoa, there are thousands. They displace the working poor – anyone of any power has slaves, not servants. Men have slave mistresses and when the slave woman bears children to the master, they are also slaves. Our innkeeper told his wife that every time he fucked their servants, he was making them money.

Need I go on? Slavery rotted their families, undermined their morals, and made them petty tyrants. To say nothing of the sins it engendered in the slaves themselves. I have seen slavery in many places – God knows that Moslems themselves will enslave anything that moves – but a Christian slave in Egypt has every possibility of freeing himself by work and is protected by laws even as a slave.

Bah! I’ve been told that it is worse elsewhere, and that my hatred of the Genoese is as foolish as any other hate. Perhaps. But I hate them the way most Englishmen hate the French – they are a nation of slavers and tyrants, with the morals of merchants and the courage of assassins. False, treacherous, cunning without wisdom, vulgar in display, ignorant, utterly without honour!

You can see why it was best I had nothing to do with negotiations.

The legate met with their senators for eight days. During those eight days, we guarded our inn and fought the podestà’s men.

They never stopped coming at us. Their honour, or whatever honour they felt they had after careers attacking the weak, had been threatened, and every man-at-arms on the city payroll made it his business to gather near our inn and make comments. By the fifth day we were threatened with outright attack.

The innkeeper wept and wrung his hands and said they’d burn the inn. I distrusted him utterly, and while I was off escorting Father
Pierre, Sabraham knocked him on the head and locked him in the basement.

After that, we were under siege. The difficult part was getting the legate through the streets to the palace each day. Sabraham and his men scouted routes every night, after dark, and I began to go out with the man; he clearly knew things I didn’t, and I was eager to learn.

I learned a great deal about roofs, and how to climb them; about ambush sites in a city, and about stealth.

And about ruthlessness.

I think it was the fifth night; we were prowling near the market, looking for a safer route to get the legate to the northern part of the city. I climbed across a board that had been left over an alley by one of Sabraham’s men, got my feet under me – heights are not my best thing – to find one of Sabraham’s soldiers, Maurice, cutting a man’s throat. The man died hard – terrified, pissing himself, with a look of horrified unbelief on his face.

‘Thief ?’ I asked.

Sabraham spread his hands. The motion said more clearly than words that Sabraham didn’t care a damn who the man was. ‘We cannot be observed,’ he said.

Later, as we went up the corbels of a church with a rope, Sabraham said ‘One of the podestà’s men.’

On the sixth day, we got the legate through the streets by misdirection, using Sister Marie’s apprentice as our bait. The French monk was hit with a rock and brought back unconscious. I’d been with him, as part of the misdirection, and my beautiful surcoat was smeared in excrement.

By mid-afternoon, they were all around our inn, and threatening to burn it. The arsonists were the podestà’s men, of course – responsible for keeping order.

We were all in full harness. Juan was with the legate, as was his new squire, a Catalan boy of good family, who had relatives in Athens. Nerio had found him for Juan, but that’s another story.

Sabraham was out with his killers, and I had Nerio and Fiore and Marc-Antonio and Alessandro and a dozen unarmed clerics to protect.

We’d shuttered the windows. The yard was defensible, but we needed a garrison twice the numbers we had.

‘What can we do?’ Marc-Antonio asked. He was in his breast and back, formerly my armour, now his. He’d lost so much weight that he could fit my old harness. I was in my new stuff.

Nerio was, for once, at a loss and we could hear them clamouring outside.

‘They burn the inn, and then what?’ Fiore said.

‘Then there’s no one to defend the legate. They
invite
him to stay at the palace. He sickens and dies.’ I shrugged. That was Sabraham’s scenario.

Nerio’s eyes met mine.

‘Anyone you can buy?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘I wish. This is Genoa. They hate Florence.’

‘And they hate the Church,’ I added. ‘At least, the Guelfs do, and they seem to be in power right now.’

A window broke.

I had a moment of clarity. I asked myself how John Hawkwood would deal with the situation, and the whole thing revealed itself to me. It unrolled like a carpet.

It may have been the first pickaxe of the first pioneer undermining my devotion to the order, but at the time—

‘I have it. Are you with me, gentlemen? It won’t be nice.’ I looked around. ‘It is a routier’s solution.’

Fiore grinned.

Ser Nerio laughed aloud. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve about had it with doing the right thing.’

I went out the main gate of the inn with one of the matron’s caps tied to a roasting spit. Fiore was at my shoulder, looking humble, and Sister Marie followed us, demure and harmless.

We were mocked, and yet, in the process of telling us that we were sons of whores and mere children and various forms of sexual deviants, our tormentors emerged from their cover. I knew the man across the street immediately, and so did Fiore – the whoreson Fiore had dropped in the muck.

I leaned out. ‘Send someone to talk!’ I roared.

Whoreson laughed. ‘Come out and surrender.’

I shook my head. ‘I have priests and nuns here. Tell us what you want.’

Whoreson swaggered towards me, master of the situation, and slapped his gauntleted hand against his cuisse. ‘What I want is that catamite right there!’ He stepped to the right to get a better view of Fiore, ignoring Sister Marie.

She tripped him, Fiore slammed a fist into his head, and we had him. But I wanted more, and I took a long stride into the confused rabble, kicked a man in the knee, got a hand under his aventail and dragged him back.

Fiore put Whoreson on the ground with a knife-tip at his temple.

Now the little square in front of the inn gate was as silent as a tomb. I pushed my prisoner through the gate and Nerio slammed him into the gatepost and then dropped him.

‘Go away,’ I shouted. ‘Or come at us, and see what happens.’

Naturally, I said nothing of all this to Father Pierre, but there was no hiding the two men bound to chairs in the common room.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Let them go. I have what I came for. I would like to leave as soon as possible.’

I pushed them out the gate with good humour. They had heard nothing of our planning, and we were free to go. Sabraham and I had made a plan – not an elaborate plan, but one that would have appealed to every routier I knew – in the kitchen.

Back with the legate, I said, ‘No dinner at the guildhall? No solemn Mass to mark the occasion?’

Father Pierre looked away. He was shattered; I could see his eyes full of tears. I had missed the signs, and I was frightened. You have to understand, he was a pillar, a tower. I don’t think I had ever seen him so used up, and so unhappy.

‘I have paid a high price for the crusade,’ he said. ‘These men …’ His eyes met mine. He was struggling against saying what he felt. Father Pierre’s lapses of hot-blooded humanity were both a relief to us – and a terror. But he knelt down on the inn floor and prayed for guidance, and then he rose. ‘Let us leave this place,’ he said.

I found Nicolas Sabraham looking at me from the kitchen door.

We smiled at each other.

Our smug self-assurance lasted as long as it took to draw a breath, and then we heard the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.

Marc-Antonio ran for the stairs, but he was too late.

The innkeeper had escaped.

I was the third man into his room, and I instantly realised two things – that his room was over the kitchen, and that someone had unlocked his shutter. There was no other way he could have got out the window.

He’d jumped on to the stable roof and then was gone.

‘I think he knows what we plan,’ I said to Sabraham.

He frowned. ‘If we’re quick—’

‘True as the cross,’ I said.

It took long minutes to get the horses saddled. Sabraham and his men went out the back of the tavern. We’d lost our hostages and our plan was betrayed – someone had let the innkeeper go. Who?

Before the legate’s horse was out in the yard, I could see men in harness moving in the alleys.

But I had two cards to play, as well. No, to be fair, Sabraham had the cards.

In Genoa, every free man has a crossbow. It is their favourite weapon; silent, mechanical, good at sea or on land. Every free man from Monaco to Liguria has one, and my greatest fear was a storm of bolts. It was evening in winter, already full dark. That had to cut the odds a little.

And the podestà’s men were overawed. They gave us space, and they were not well-organised. I’m going to guess that their Milanese master didn’t trust his lieutenants, so, as he could not appear himself, they were rudderless.

The quarter hour struck in the neighbourhood church. We had ten mules with all the legate’s goods, mostly desks and a portable altar and other necessaries.

We kept the gate closed.

Father Pierre looked at me. His face was pale and he was deeply unhappy.